Tuesday, January 25, 2011

FLICK U: BLUE VALENTINE

Whose that dude? You know. The one in all the action hero movies. . . The ab porn dude. Chris Evans? Ryan Reynolds? Ryan Gosling? To be honest I try to avoid movies with that dude in it. I tend to like my gratuitous ab porn coupled with a bona fide hard-on and a cum shot. Ab porn in Hollywood movies doesn't bode well.

I walked into "Blue Valentine" expecting the worse. Ryan Gosling is that dude right? Fortunately, there was only one brief shirtless ab scene tastefully shot from the side. Ryan also appears in the recently released film "All Good Things" a thriller based on the longest un-solved disappearance in New York City history. I wanted to see that film as well but the gratuitous ab-porn scene featured in the trailer kept me away (first three pics above). Turns out Ryan Gosling is not that dude. I think it may in fact be Ryan Reynolds? Gosling has actually appeared in quite a few movies I've enjoyed including "Lars and the Real Girl" and "The Believer". . .

"Blue Valentine" blows those other films out of the water. It may be one of the best films I've seen all year. An elegiac and painfully familiar portrayal of a couple struggling at the end of a difficult marriage, "Blue Valentine" offers a compelling study in the fraught relationship between Feminism and masculinity. Its a difficult task to make a movie about alcoholism and the legacies of domestic violence in a heterosexual relationship. Its even harder to do so and make the husband look heroic. It may sound like a drag (I had to drag myself to the theater), but it pays off-- sheer beauty at work. I'll never think of Ryan Gosling the same way again. :-)

3 comments:

Ryan Gosling gives the best performance of the year here! I went with a girlfriend who cried through almost the entire film; she had just emerged from a relationship that included so many familiar moments from this film.

If you haven't seen Gosling in the movie Half Nelson, check it out. He's a crack-addicted High School teacher, and he's staggeringly good. The young actress Shareeka Epps is also stellar, and Jerri Blank's stepmom from Strangers with Candy is in it too.